The father of the LED is now looking to revolutionize the industry he helped create. Soraa, a Silicon Valley startup co-founded by Shuji Nakamura — who created the blue laser and the white LED — officially unveiled the technology behind its LED innovation on Tuesday. The company, which is backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, has developed a new way to manufacturer an LED light that produces a light that is brighter, has a better quality, is more energy efficient, and saves more money than its competitors on the market.

The first light Soraa is launching is a lamp to replace a halogen bulb (called an MR16), which are commonly used in places like recessed ceiling lights and spot lights on products in stores and venues. These aren’t lamps for the everyday home owner, and Soraa is targeting commercial and industrial building owners first, before it moves to the residential market.

During an interview with Soraa CEO Eric Kim at Soraa’s factory, Kim explained to me that “light is not a commodity,” as he showed me the light from the Soraa lamp in comparison to a variety of LED competitors including giants like Philips that also make halogen replacement LEDs. Indeed in the various tests the bright white light displayed a far better quality, consistency, color and angle than the comparison light.

That type of quality would be pretty cool on its own. But Soraa’s LED light is also highly energy efficient. It uses about 75 percent less energy than incandescent and halogen bulbs, and lasts 25 times longer than halogen bulbs. For a company that’s buying lighting for a commercial building, a Soraa light can deliver a year pay back period in energy savings, said Kim.

How does it work?

Soraa’s secret sauce lies in the startup’s early bet on using the semiconductor gallium nitride for the substrate part of the light. LEDs are usually made by putting gallium nitride onto sapphire of silicon carbide substrates. But Soraa’s light places gallium nitride onto a gallium nitride substrate, enabling the core of the light itself to create better uniformity. Soraa says the combo is more cost effective and can produce more light per lamp than the traditional methods.

While the tech sounds like a perfect thing to license to the big players, Soraa is making the big bet that it can be a vertically-integrated LED manufacturer, making the substrate, chip, packaging and entire light solution. That’s always a slight risk, because that can be capital intensive, but on the other hand, the payoff and potential are a lot higher when you own the whole value chain.

Soraa is currently moving into volume commercial production at its factory in Fremont, Calif. Kim tells me at the company’s current fab, it will be able to turn into a 0 million revenue per year company.

Soraa, which was founded in 2008, is backed by Khosla Ventures, NEA and NGEN Partners and has raised over 0 million in funding.

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Native 4K recording? Check. A built-for-war body? You bet. Backordered despite a downright shocking ,700 price tag? Most certainly. As with RED’s prior products, the Scarlet-X seems to be wowing just about every shooter lucky enough to come into contact with one. Luck for you, the folks over at Cinema5D have spent an inordinate of amount of time with this beast in order to deliver the full skinny on whether it’s worth the price (and wait). We won’t bother spoiling any conclusions for you, but if you’ve been toying with the idea of blowing your (and your SO’s) bonus on one of these in a bid to start your own movie house, there’s a vid just after the break that deserves your attention.

Continue reading RED’s Scarlet-X 4K camera gets video review: you’ve never needed ,700 so badly

RED’s Scarlet-X 4K camera gets video review: you’ve never needed ,700 so badly originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HP was ready to go to the mattresses in an all-out mobile war against Apple. Instead, HP?s TouchPad was prematurely put to sleep, and the company is still nursing its wounds.

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Nokia eked out a decent third quarter based on strong feature phone sales, helping the company beat analyst expectations. Nokia’s revenue fell 13 percent to 8.98 billion euros (US .3 billion) with handset shipments decreasing by 3 percent to 106.6 million units, (89.9 million feature phones and 16.8m smartphones) a more gentle decline than analysts had predicted. It managed a diluted earnings per share of 0.03 euros, beating out analysts expectations of a 0.01 euro loss.

The news has sparked some excitement around Nokia’s stock, which is up on the hopes that the company is managing its transition well and may be turning a corner. But the real challenge awaits as Nokia prepares to unveil its first Windows Phone devices next week at Nokia World, beginning to show how its big bet on Microsoft’s mobile operating system will play out. That’s where Nokia will need to make its stand because it can’t rely on feature phones, which will only become more like smartphones over time.

Smartphone penetration continues to grow and feature phones are increasingly going to be left behind. The average selling price of low-end phones plummeted 20 percent year over year, dropping Nokia’s operating margins to 2.4 percent compared to 11.3 percent a year earlier. The future for Nokia is in smartphones, a market it used to lead with its Symbian devices, which have fallen behind Android and iPhone devices in popularity with many consumers. Nokia’s smartphone sales fell to 16.8 million units in the third quarter, down 38 percent year over year and up just 1 percent sequentially from the second quarter. A lot will rest on what Nokia can conjure up and how interesting it can make its phones, which will be competing against devices from other Windows Phone makers.

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop said Nokia will bring its first WP7 devices to specific countries later this year before a systematic increase in markets and launch partners in 2012. That means that this coming quarter is also not likely to reflect a big showing in WP7 devices, or smartphones overall, unless Nokia creates an absolute home run that can move units in a big way despite a limited roll-out in select countries.

The big test will be next year as it ramps up distribution of Windows Phones. But the pressure is on for Nokia to demonstrate that it made the right bet on Windows Phone and that it has some pretty stunning hardware to show for it. The handsets will need to be markedly better than anything its got in its stable including the N9, a very compelling device that launched with Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo OS. Positive reviews of the N9 have prompted many to wonder why Nokia essentially discarded MeeGo in favor of Windows Phone 7, something Elop will have to answer by showing just how much Nokia can do with Microsoft’s platform.

I still have some reservations about Nokia and Windows Phone. There’s no guarantee that Nokia feature phone and existing smartphone users will automatically move up to a Nokia WP device, just because of the brand name. The two companies will need to bring their A-game and show that any device they collaborate on can stand up to the iPhone 4S, with its new operating system and new Android 4.0-based devices. As we’ve noted, Mango is a big software update that puts Windows Phone in a great position to compete, but some of those improvements are starting to get lost in the frenzy around iOS 5 and Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

The stakes are extremely high for Nokia, which has bet the farm on Windows Phone. All eyes will be on the company next week and it’s got a great shot at showing how far its come in this rocky transition. But it’s going to have to rise to the challenge because the market is only accelerating toward smartphones and Nokia knows it can’t bank on feature phones to bail it out in upcoming quarters.

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Joining the likes of competitors AT&T and Verizon, Sprint will soon begin building its own 4G LTE network, essentially admitting its bet on the rival WiMax standard was a bust. Sprint, the nation’s third largest carrier, plans to roll out its 4G LTE network on the 1900MHz spectrum by mid-2012, with complete build-out by the end of 2013.

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